Hardware Sizing

[Humberto Hernandez]

Hello List, this message is not related directly to JSP programming but the answers may be of interest to JSP programmers.

I need to estimate computer equipment to replace our current site. Our new site will run with Apache, TomCat, and JSPs and according to the WebTrends it willl need to serve 100_000 hits, 20_000 page views and 1_300 sessions in the busiest hour. We will like to buy a Linux or Sun box but we don't have an idea on what kind of equipment.
We interpret a hit as any request to the web server (.html, .gif, .jpg, etc.)
We interpret a page view as a request for an html, jsp file.
If you have any numbers from your site that may help us do the estimation I will appreciate your answer and I will sumarize the results in this thread.
Thank you
--
Humberto

[William Brogden]

You may want to run the Orion or Resin server for highest throughput. Tomcat is distinctly slower, not surprising since it is a "reference" implementation with correctness being the first consideration.
Bill

[Jeroen Wenting]

I fully agree that Tomcat is not a good choice for a production site. Go with Orion or Resin.
As to hardware, with a Java solution RAM is the primary considerations. Get as much as you can stuff into whatever box you buy.
Whether you get Linux or Solaris (or Linux on Sparc) depends mainly on the level of experience you/your people have in maintaining those platforms. If you have a good Solaris sysadmin, go for Solaris, otherwise go for Linux and spend more on hardware.
I probably don't have to tell you to get a good network connection, as you seem to already have a server up and the connection can handle the load.
If you can, go dual CPU (or better), and run the application server in its own CPU for optimal performance.

[Humberto Hernandez]

These advices have been very valuable. I looked at the Orion (www.orionserver.com) and Resin (www.caoucho.com)sites as well as other benchmarks and it seems there is a huge difference in performance. I also found some interesting information about load balancing and caching. It may be a good idea to scale to several servers that can backup each other instead of buying bigger machines. Specially since the Resin server has sticky sessions.
I will aprecciate any information you may have, that may help me select the web server(s).